NLRB Excludes Theology Teachers from Bargaining Unit at Catholic Universities

Thursday, August 25, 2016

While the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) decision this week in the teaching assistants’ case caught most of the headlines, the very same day the Board also issued two important rulings defining appropriate bargaining units at Catholic universities.

In cases arising at Seattle University (a Catholic university operated by the Jesuit order) and Saint Xavier University (a Chicago-area Catholic university founded by the Sisters of Mercy), the Board determined that faculty teaching theology and religion were exempt from the coverage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and therefore must be excluded from the petitioned-for bargaining units.

At Seattle University, the Service Employees International Union, Local 925, sought to represent a bargaining unit comprised of all non-tenure eligible faculty at the university other than those teaching nursing and law. At Saint Xavier, the Illinois Education Association (IEA-NEA) petitioned to represent all part-time faculty at the university other than those teaching at the School of Nursing.

In reaching its decision, the Board retraced its torturous reasoning in Pacific Lutheran University, 361 NLRB 157 (2014), in which it sought to avoid the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago, 440 U.S. 490 (1979). In that case, the Supreme Court instructed that the NLRA must be construed to exclude teachers in church-operated schools because to do otherwise “will necessarily involve inquiry into the good faith of the position asserted by the clergy-administrators and its relationship to the school’s religious mission.” The court concluded that the Board’s assertion of jurisdiction over teachers in church-operated schools would give “rise to entangling church-state relationships of the kind the Religion Clauses sought to avoid.” For the Board to engage in such inquiry would violate the First Amendment.

http://www.natlawreview.com/article/nlrb-excludes-theology-teachers-bargaining-unit-catholic-universities

The two decisions can be found here https://www.nlrb.gov/cases-decisions/board-decisions under:

364 NLRB No. 85 Saint Xavier University 08/23/2016 13-RC-022025

and

364 NLRB No. 84 Seattle University 08/23/2016 19-RC-122863